I attended a lecture by Ralph Folsom, a law professor from the University of San Diego earlier this month, who spoke on the potential of a Middle Eastern Free Trade Agreement at the John Marshall Center for International Business & Trade law. He trudged through the snow for the 1st time in 10 years to speak with us.
Here are the main points I pulled out of his talk:
-MEFTA would contain 14 countries, including 4 in North Africa
-the FTA & relations with Israel are a major stumbling block
-”Qualifying Industrial Zones” QIZ’s would enable free trade with the US
-there were no free trade agreements in the Middle East 1985-2001
-unions in Jordan complain about workers from Bangladesh
-MEFTA would include possibilities with Iran & Syria, & exclude Turkey because it would be bad for Turkey’s application to the European Union
-Morocco was the 1st country in the world to recognize the US in 1776 & 1st MEFTA agreement with the European Union, & then US.
-Bahrain was the 2nd MEFTA agreement (driven by the US’ Iraq strategy), which is a copy of the agreement with Morocco, but trade with Bahrain is miniscule.
-Oman signed the 3rd MEFTA agreement-fyi, by signing, members cannot follow the Arab League’s boycott of Israel
-the United Arab Emirates is important because it has lots of gas & is the 3rd largest trading partner in the Middle East, but is a problem because there are many Iranian ex-pats there.
-It might have been advantageous to negotiate with the Gulf Cooperation Council, a customs union of 6 countries, rather than negotiate with each individually.
I tried to capture what Prof. Folsom said. If you’d like a copy of his more comprehensive paper “Trading for National Security? United States Free Trade Agreements in the Middle East & North Africa,” to see what he wrote, send him an e-mail message @ rfolsom@sandiego.edu or give him a call @ 619-260-2325 to request a copy. I contacted him both ways to ask to post it here, but never heard back from him.
